How to Talk to Climate Skeptics

With the Paris UN Climate Conference 2015 in full swing, let me give you a link to speak to climate deniers: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. It's a large amount of reading if you want to follow every link but it is great information. 

While you are at it, you should read Exxon And The Koch Family Have Powered The Climate-Denial Machine For Decades. 

Why Is EPEC So Afraid of Solar?

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It seems that the El Paso Electric Company is afraid of the solar industry. They seem afraid of your having solar panels on your home and producing your own clean energy. If you buy electricity from them even if it is generated by photovoltaic panels, that's okay. Just don't produce your own, thank you very much. Why?

Of course it cuts into their profits. It's not just solar users, it's most of us. Over the last five or so years, demand for electricity has been down in El Paso. Solar is a very small part of reducing that demand. More efficient appliances and energy efficient homes have reduced demand. Yet, EPEC wants all of us - not just solar users - to pay higher fees to help them build more production facilities. Why? Again, demand is down. 

First, know that EPEC sells energy that it doesn't use back to the grid where other utilities can buy it. They make money on excess electricity. We are all subsidizing EPEC by financing their capital improvements. They improve, sell to the grid and get you to pay for all of it. Over five years they have made just about a half billion dollars in El Paso. How much has gone back to our community? A thousand buck pop for this thing or that thing. Good PR only.

Second, EPEC's rate hike on solar is really part of a nationwide cabal by the oil and gas industry and the electrical utilities to stop solar - to take away your right to buy a different product. They and their cronies talk free markets, but the unspoken disclaimer is that the market is free as long as it only belongs to them.

The Koch brothers and big utilities campaign to unplug solar power is the title of a David Horsey piece for the Los Angeles Times last year. About the tea party darlings, Horsey writes: "Consumer choice. Business competition. Autonomy for individual Americans. Those certainly seem like sound conservative principles. You would think that is something the Koch brothers could appreciate, but, obviously, their brand of conservatism is defined less by principles than by profits." Note to readers: the Kochs aren't really conservatives. They are oligarchs. As the article mentions, real conservatives like Barry Goldwater, Jr. (Yes, Barry's boy and a good man. I've met him.) Barry Jr. is for consumer choice.

Even the Walmart Waltons have joined the effort to stop you from having solar panels on your home. Certainly Walmart isn't a utility or a natural gas or coal producer. But they are 30% owners of First Solar, a company that makes solar arrays for utility companies. First Solar and the good ol' Waltons don't want you making your own energy. They want you to buy electricity from utilities. That is why the Walmart heirs "have given $4.5 million dollars to groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Americans for Prosperity—groups that are attacking renewable energy policies at the state level and, specifically, pushing for fees on rooftop solar installations." Read more HERE.

Remarkably the Walmart is the largest corporate user of solar panels. In Walmart Is the Biggest Corporate Solar User. Why Are Its Owners Funding Groups That Oppose Solar?, Tim McDonnell states:"Walmart loves solar power—as long as it's on their roof, and not yours." Tim's article also has a long list of the groups Walmart supports. All these groups in one way or another are fighting clean energy.

EPEC wants you to pay for their production so that they can sell the excess energy to other utilities. They don't want you to use solar and will dissuade you from doing so not because of what they are saying in their PR hype, but because they are part of a nationwide effort to destroy the solar industry so they and they alone sell you electricity. 

Does El Paso Electric CEO Shockley Sleep at Night?

That's the question when you hear his sophistry and misinformation that he feeds to the public about El Paso Electric Company's proposed rate hikes.

If you haven't, take a moment to read Vic Kolenc's El Paso Times Story, El Paso Electric wants to increase charges for solar homes. 

Included in that story are the onerous rate increases for every El Pasoan who doesn't have solar energy panels. That increase is 12%. Combine that fact with Lindsey Anderson's story this morning, School districts may fight El Paso Electric rate increase, because it will cost districts millions, anyone can see the huge burden these rate increases put on everyone as a rate payer and as a school district tax payer.

When it comes to solar energy users, the rate hike is 24% for what electric utilities like to call "free loading" by "free riders" (the rooftop solar owners) - getting the advantage of the utiliy's infrastructure without contributing equally to it. Nonsense! With more people converting to solar, there is less need for added infrastructure. But, less need for utility power production and distribution, means far less money that the utility makes. 

Shockley claims that EPEC has a proven record with solar. They were forced by New Mexico law six years ago to increase renewable energy production. In time EPEC discovered that solar had economic advantages so they have invested in solar energy plants. Great. What if they invested more through incentives in photovoltaic panels for homeowners and businesses and cut the need for bigger solar plants of their own? Shockley doesn't care about solar. Shockley cares about how much money his company is making. Therefore, when it comes right down to it, he doesn't want you to produce your own electricity from solar. He wants you to buy it from EPEC however they produce it - mainly with natural gas. (Frackers love him.)

The Shockley statement (reported by Kolenc) that I found most shocking was that "the rooftop solar industry has local and national lobbyists and lawyers who will aggressively make their case to regulators." By far the biggest lobbying effort against clean energy such as photovoltaics is coming from the infamous Koch Brothers and a lobbying group known as ALEC. No matter what ALEC claims about being for a free market and local control, they are anything but. They are for control of markets by mega-corporations and especially the gas and oil industry, and they want control of public laws to limit local control even to the point of those free-riding solar panel users. Just read through the following stories online:

The Koch Attack on Solar Energy

Koch Brothers And ALEC Expand Fight On Clean Energy Users

Exposing ALEC: How Conservative-Backed State Laws Are All Connected

Texas lobbying group busted for phony anti-solar campaign

In Sunshine State, Big Energy Blocks Solar Power

Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar

All efforts by the solar industry's lobbying efforts are miniscule compared to the billions paid for lobbying by the Kochs, ALEC, the fossil-fuel industries and the electric utilities themselves. Schockley must know this.

In the end, El Paso Electric will burden not just solar users but all users - homeowners, business people, schools, etc. Rate payers and tax payers. You and me. There is an online petition opposing the rate hikes. Please visit it now.

Again, from an elpasonaturally reader:

I make tacos.
You buy my tacos for $5 each.
You no like my tacos?
Then you pay me $8.
Someone has to pay for my tacos.


Please support elpasonaturally©. Go HERE to contribute and help turn El Paso "green".

El Paso Electric Hates It When You Generate Your Own Electricity

From elpasoinc.com

The El Paso Electric Company hates it when you generate your own electricity. Their current rate hike requests penalize users of solar energy. Read Robert Gray's El Paso Inc. story, Solar customers worry about rate case: Electric utility proposes big jump for power generators. See the rate hike chart above.

EPEC argues that people who use solar power are subsidizing those users who do not. EPEC has to build and maintain power stations, electric poles, etc. and that costs money especially as more homes and commercial buildings get built, more sprawl is created and more homes and other buildings use central air. Obviously if you aren't using solar, you are paying more for the power grid than someone who is paying less. The same argument can be made about people who turn off lights when not needed, turn up the thermostat in the summer, turn-off computers and so forth. EPEC isn't really encouraging conservation.

Imagine a scenario where everyone generates electricity during the day with their solar panels. At night that electricity goes back to the grid - in effect, thousands of electric generators. There would be little need to build more power stations and there would probably be a shut down of some stations or else less use of those stations. Less water for steam and cooling. Less use of fossil fuels. What's the matter with that?

Simple. Less electricity produced by EPEC means less that they sell to you and me and, therefore, less money that they will make. Sure they want you to conserve up to a point. They don't want to spend too much on power peaks. However, they don't want you to conserve too much nor produce your own electricity. In case of the latter, they want to punish you rather than incentivize the renewable energy that you make.

What should happen is that the city of El Paso (or any city) should take over the electric utility. Encourage renewables by charging people with solar panels less. Discourage over use. Cut back on infrastructure such as power stations. The city doesn't have to make money on the commodity of electricity. They can encourage home production of power with renewable sources.

EPEC's power grab (pun intended) is going on with utilities around the country. Led by folks such as the Koch Brothers, the industry is fighting what they call "freeloaders" - people who use solar and sell back to the grid. Of course, freeloader has the additional meaning of someone who mooches and steals - how the utilities want you to think about people with solar energy. If there are more people using solar without paying a higher rate and getting less back for the electricity that goes back to the grid, there is less power to sell and less fossil fuels to be purchased from folks like the Koch boys.

What EPEC and the electric industry knows and fears is this: they are going the way of the telephone or the television cable companies. They are going the way of the horse and buggy. They are going the way of the dinosaur. Cell phone technology replaced the need for a grid of millions of miles of wires. More people are streaming rather than buying dozens of television channels that they never watch. More people will either get off the grid or go to micro-grids. (Watch out when battery technology improves and gets cheaper.)

Finally, as far as laws that prevent people from getting off the grid are concerned, the day will come when enough people will not care a rat's ass. It is or once was a free country not ruled by an oligarchy of powerful fossil fuel companies and their corps of crony capitalists.


Please support elpasonaturally©. Go HERE to donate and help turn El Paso "green".